SayIt is the civic software for publishing “smart” transcripts

An open-source tool that provides PDF transcripts of speeches.

MySociety, the "e-democracy project" behind FixMyStreet and FixMyTransport, has launched a piece of civic software called SayIt, which publishes transcripts of speeches in a way that is easy to access and share.

SayIt is an open-source tool that has been built in collaboration with the Poplus network. The aim is to provide a resource for people who want to run websites and apps that can keep track of what politicians and other powerful people say. Transcripts can be stripped out of PDFs—a search-unfriendly data format—and published to SayIt so that they are easy to search and analyze.

The mobile-optimized publishing tool has built-in search functionality and allows people to link directly to any part of the transcripts. SayIt can be used as a hosted service or it can be built into a third-party website. In fact, MySociety says that SayIt's main purpose is to be built into other sites.

"We don't have a live demo of this today, but one of our international partners will soon be launching a new Parliamentary Monitoring site which uses SayIt to publish years of parliamentary transcripts," says MySociety in a blog post.

In the Leveson Inquiry, for example, users can search by session, e.g., Paul Dacre, Nick Clegg, Hugh Grant, and JK Rowling, or by speaker. Within each session, each speaker is marked out clearly and color-coded. You can click on any name to see only the comments they have made and hyperlink to any one comment.

MySociety's Marketing and Communications Manager, Myfanwy Nixon, told Wired.co.uk that the biggest challenge has been stripping out the data from a wide range of documents.

"The transcripts tend to be in all sorts of different formats—PDFs, Word documents, scans, you name it—and each requires a slightly different approach. You can't just run a magic piece of code and immediately get them all nice and shiny."

The team has adopted the Akoma Ntoso standard of open data. A lot of the work has been around parsing transcripts so that they display properly. Phase two will involve launching a direct authoring interface which will format transcripts as they are created.

"But we also foresee that a lot of organizations and individuals will have existing transcripts that they want to publish. We're keen to see this happen, but we know that the biggest task will be transforming them into a format we can use. Not impossible, just (often) labor-intensive," says Nixon.

SayIt is part of MySociety's "Components" strategy, which focuses on getting lots of organizations to pool resources to develop civic software instead of everyone working in isolation. In September 2013, the organization wrote about a system that would allow anyone interested to go into a council meeting and create a "local Hansard."